Doctors cool some newborn babies who show signs of brain injury after a difficult birth, because lowering the body temperature for three days protects the brain. A study from Türkiye found that about one in ten cooled babies turned out to have a different underlying condition — a tumour, a genetic…

Doctors in Toronto wanted to find a kinder way to ease the pain premature babies feel when a long IV line is placed into a vein, so they tested a painkiller sprayed into the nose instead of given by needle. Their small study set out to enrol 24 babies but reached only 8, mostly because these…

Researchers combined 13 small studies of 552 newborns to ask whether a protein in a baby's urine, called kidney injury molecule-1, is raised when the kidneys have been injured. It was — but only moderately, and the studies disagreed a great deal, so the researchers rated their own confidence in the…

Premature babies often lack surfactant, a substance that keeps the tiny air sacs in the lungs from collapsing, so doctors give it as a medicine soon after birth. A study of 138 babies in six Chinese hospitals compared the usual method — a thin tube passed briefly into the windpipe — with a newly…

Having a baby in neonatal intensive care is one of the hardest things a parent can go through, and anxiety, low mood and stress are common among these families. Three new studies asked what actually helps: support given by staff in hospital worked well, and so did teaching parents to use touch…

Researchers in Oaxaca, Mexico, tested a smartphone app that estimates a newborn's jaundice level from a photograph, comparing it with a laboratory blood test in 164 babies. The app was reasonably accurate for mild jaundice but tended to read too low when levels were high. A careful look at the baby…

Keeping a very premature baby warm in the first minutes after birth is one of the most important — and surprisingly difficult — jobs in the delivery room, because these tiny infants lose heat extraordinarily fast. A team of doctors and nurses in Sydney, Australia ran a careful experiment to see…

A large study in the United States and Canada tested whether helping very premature babies breathe before the umbilical cord is cut protects them from bleeding in the brain. It did not. But a second analysis of the same 570 babies found those babies settled faster in the first minute and needed a…

Premature babies are often given vitamin A in the hope of protecting their fragile lungs from a chronic lung condition called bronchopulmonary dysplasia. A 2025 review combined five clinical trials involving 1,715 very premature babies and found that vitamin A given by mouth did not meaningfully…

A large European study has tested a gentler way to handle the umbilical cord at a very premature birth: instead of clamping the cord after a set number of seconds, doctors waited until the baby was breathing well and stable before clamping. This approach did not increase the number of babies who…

Two research teams published studies in March 2026 testing whether artificial intelligence can identify the warning sign that tells doctors a premature baby's eye disease needs urgent treatment. Both systems performed well on the images they were trained with. Both stumbled when shown photographs…

A large US study of 660 children who were born extremely prematurely found that those who had a sudden kidney problem in their first weeks of life were more likely, two years later, to have delays in thinking and learning. About 4 in 10 of these babies had such kidney injury, and after accounting…